A Breed Apart
by Vkitty
Summary: AU What if Manticore had succeeded in reconditioning Max when she was recaptured?
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter one: Broken**

"Sweet! Food!"

"Seven-ninety-three, control yourself."

"Come on, don't tell me that those war rations made you want to swear off of food after a while," 793 surveyed the refrigerator and smiled dreamily. "Hey, four-five-two, check it out, we've got chips! Actual real-life junk food!" 793 grabbed the bag of Ruffles from the fridge and ripped it open. "Want some? I tried them on my last solo mission, they're great." 452 smiled, but shook her head. "Want a candy bar then? We've got some of those too."

"Nah," 452 said. "I'm not hungry."

"Let's go somewhere then. I haven't been out on a solo mission for two years, 452. I want excitement! I want dancing! I want --" 452 grabbed the television remote and flicked the TV on. "TV..." 793 crooned. "We've got actual TV!"

"Soak it up while you can," 452 advised. "We've got to start our mission for --"

"Not another two hours, 452. Chill," 793 said. "Eat chips, and sit down on this nice, comfy leather sofa and drink a beer."

"I don't drink," 452 maintained.

"You're so... uptight, 452. We're not under surveillance, and we finally get a chance to relax and eat Ruffles," 793 held a chip up and ate it as a demonstration.

"Yeah, until we have to kill somebody," 452 said.

"Please. You and I both know that we do recon first," 793 got up and started looking around the apartment again. "And, I say again, that is in two hours and -- oh! We've got actual beds and not just bunks!"

"I know, you're blissful at the lack of military accommodations. I'm going for a walk," 452 snapped.

"That would do wonders for the aura of the place," 793 sneered playfully. 452 grabbed up her jacket and walked out of the apartment.

The apartment hadn't been bought, it had been taken. One quick jab to the neck with a piece of glass, and the apartment was free. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, already furnished, with hot water, electricity and food already in the fridge -- it was a soldier's dream home. Or, 793's dream home at least.

452 had only met 793 a few hours before they departed to find a place to live. 793 was more preppy cheerleader than soldier in 452's eyes; she jumped around, she smiled excessively, and she laughed far more than necessary.

"Hey, beautiful! Want to get a drink?" 452 brushed past the smelly, drunk man and kept walking. She approached the Sector check-point to enter Sector 5 and stopped. _That's _what she needed. Personal transportation.

"Hey, Max?"

"Yeah," 452 said dismissively, wondering how to get a means of transportation. 793 had driven them through the city in a Manticore-provided car, searching for a place to stay, while 452 sat in the back seat wondering what it was about Seattle that seemed so familiar.

"Where've you been? I haven't seen you around for a while." 452 turned to the person who was talking to her, finally cluing on what they had said.

"What?" she asked. It was a boy on a motorcycle, around her age, with dark hair.

"Remember me? Rafer?" he asked.

"No, I don't think I know you," 452 said. "And my name's not Max. It's," she thought for one frustrating second. "Tanya Newton." A motorcycle. Maybe she could get her hands on a motorcycle. Not the one this "Rafer" guy was riding. Something along the lines of a... a black Ninja.

452 walked off without another word to the guy. She needed to get her hands on a Ninja before they had to go do reconnaissance.

_It's not just a machine. It's an extension of my soul, if there is such a thing. _452 wasn't sure where she'd heard those words, but right now they were buzzing annoyingly around her head.

After wandering aimlessly around Sector 6 for a bit longer, she decided to head back to the apartment. When she got back through the door, she found 793 still bouncing around the place and giggling to herself about feather down comforters.

"Whatever," 452 said, grinning despite herself. 793 stopped and checked her watch.

"You walked around for an hour," she said.

"You figured that out, huh?" 452 asked sarcastically.

"Guess I can't blame you. This is only your first mission since you got recaptured right? I'd be out there soakin' it all in if I'd been cooped up watchin' the X8s too."

"Recaptured?" 452 asked. 793 nodded.

"Yeah. You know, your great Dirty Dozens escape in '09? Spent a decade on the outside and got dragged back kicking and screaming?" 793 babbled. 452 shook her head.

"That's idiotic. Why would anyone escape from Manticore?" 793 frowned in thought, and then a look of realization came across her pale features.

"Oh, I get it. What level of re-indoctrination did you get? I heard they go up to twenty."

"Level ten," 452 said. "Wait, you mean, I was out here?"

"No," 793 lied quickly. "You know me, I had a sugar high. I babbled."

"More like you tattled. Tell me what's going on," 452 demanded.

"I don't know what you're talking about," 793 said.

"I think you do," 452 contradicted. "You see, I just got ID'd by a guy named Rafer out there; and if I have to figure out why by myself, maybe spill a little bit of Manticore information, then I will."

"You're bluffing," 793 called.

"Try me." 793 hesitated for a moment.

"Look, all I know is that you and a couple of your little rugrat friends escaped in '09. You guys came back and blew up the DNA database about a year back and _that's _why we have the breeding program," she said bitterly.

"I don't understand. I don't remember any of that."

"Re-indoctrination level ten could do that to a body, I guess," 793 looked at her watch again. "We'd better get going, we need to get to that ballet class for recon. You game?" she asked 452.

"Yeah, I'm game," 452 said.

"Great. Let's get moving."

* * *

**A/N: I'm redoing this fic because I wasn't as happy with how it was last time. Starting next chapter is new stuff. Please review!**


	2. Chapter 2

_**From the files of Adriana Ponce, a Mexican secretary who resided in Jalisco during the Mexican-Colombian war of 2020**_

**_Translated from its original Spanish to English_**

**This war's victims are getting younger every day. I was approached by a young girl who was holding one of the flyers that Dr. Geraldo Asuncion – her boss had put around the city. She wished to sell a kidney, bone marrow, and her ovaries. She couldn't have been more than fifteen. I listened from my desk as Asuncion talked to her, and finally settled on a reasonable price. She'd brought a friend with her, an American girl who I asked, "Why is she doing this?" **

**The American replied, "It's all right. They grow back." **

"**No they don't," I told her. The girl laughed at me like I was ignorant. She had such white teeth – and she laughed like a lunatic.**

"**Maybe not for _you _they don't. But they grow back for us." **

'**For us'. What did she mean by that? Aren't we all the same? **

For some reason, 452 always had more time on her hands than other X5s, so she always had more boring duties than the others.

"Laundry duty," 452 muttered to herself. It was the mother of all embarrassing things – having to pick up the bed sheets from different cells and deliver them to the laundry room. It was demeaning and unclean and…

"Ugh," 452 groaned upon finding a condom amongst some tangled up sheets. She threw the sheets in the basket and moved onto the next room. She'd never really worked in Ward E before, but it was by far the grossest place in Manticore she'd come across so far. She'd found a head of cabbage in E-3.

"It's not my fault! We're two completely different weight classes - Diosa should have taken that into consideration before she put us on the mat!" a voice floated down the hallway. "Hey… why are all the cell doors open?"

"Dunno," came the reply. 452 sighed and continued gathering up the sheets. She turned to leave, only to be stopped at the door by two X6s.

"Are you stealing our sheets?" one of them – a redheaded female – inquired.

"I'm on the laundry shift today and it happens to be this ward's turn for bed cleaning," 452 explained.

The redhead turned towards her male companion. "I thought Manticore had _staff _for these kinds of things. Director must really be gettin' cheap if it's come to this."

"It's for disciplinary reasons," 452 retorted, pushing past them. The girl wasn't about to let this go, though.

"I get it," she said with a grin. "A little more kitty means a little more unruliness. Wasn't it _nine _of you X5s that escaped way back when?" 452 dropped the basket and turned around.

"Excuse me?"

The redhead shrugged. "I was too young to really remember anything, but some older Sixes tell the story of the Nine Oh-Niners who went psycho and tried to run away in the dead of winter. Manticore caught some – six, they said, but the rest are still out in the world somewhere; and the ones that were recaptured went stark raving mad and were trapped in the basement and fought amongst each other until Manticore took it upon themselves to slaughter all but one."

452 frowned. "That's not true," she said decisively.

"Yeah, actually, that's not the real story," the boy next to the redhead said. "There were, like, sixteen of them and twelve got out and they've recaptured…"

"Three," 452 said out loud.

"Really, I heard there were six," the redhead said.

"That's just what Manticore told you to get you to act like good little X-Series and not run away," 452 said sardonically. She pushed past them into the hallway and strode into the next cell – unfortunately, the Sixes followed her.

"Say, what's your designation, anyways?" the girl asked. "I mean, how are we supposed to know if you're really on laundry duty and not just stealing our sheets or something?"

"Why would I _want _to steal the sheets of a bunch of dirty, sadistic, drug-dependent ten-year-olds?" 452 asked sarcastically. "Ugh, what's that _smell?" _she groaned.

"I know, I smell it too," the redhead told 452. The redhead looked towards her companion, but he just gestured to his bandaged up nose. "Right," she muttered. 452 shook her head and pulled the top sheet off of the bed.

She stopped. "Ring the Director up, will ya?" she asked. "And tell her to bring the nurse, too."

"Why?" the redhead asked, approaching the bed. She grunted in disgust and turned back around again.

"Tell her someone's wound re-opened in E-8," 452 grimaced. "And it looks fatal."

* * *

"_ALL X5 AND X6 SERIES TRANSGENICS TO LECTURE HALL ONE. ALL X5 AND X6 SERIES TRANSGENICS TO LECTURE HALL ONE. ALL X8 SERIES TRANSGENICS TO LECTURE HALL SIX. ALL X8 SERIES TRANSGENICS TO LECTURE HALL SIX…" _the message repeated over again from the beginning as transgenics hurried from the dining room into their respective lecture halls.

"All fifty-two X6s here," X5-734 told Renfro after a quick scan of the room. "But there's only 28 out of the 35 X5s on the premises here."

"Five X5s are out on guard duty. Go bring them in," Renfro told 734. 734 nodded and headed out of the room, nodding briefly at 452 on her way out. 452 continued up the steps to a seat with the rest of her unit, passing several X6s on her way up. She couldn't help but wonder who was the one who'd pulled a stitch sleeping.

"Green eyes, black hair – totally wasted," one X6 male bragged to his friend. 452 made a face as he continued on to say, "Body like whoa…"

"Brown hair is really all the rage these days," one blonde girl said. "I'm thinking on getting a permit from Renfro to change my color…"

"Aw, your hair looks fine!" 452 overheard the girl in front of her.

"Attention, everyone! Attention!" a colonel said ineffectively from the front of the room. "Attention!" Renfro scoffed and walked up to the podium, pushing the colonel aside.

"Listen up!" she shouted into the microphone. The entire room quieted. Renfro nodded with a bit of a smile. "All right then. Now, we have appointments with the infirmary for each X-series during which time you're all expected to show up. The following X5s _will _be subjected to a complete physical and cavity exam in fifteen minutes time: X5-211, X5-218, X5-322, X5-387. Any questions?" she asked. At least fifteen hands shot in the air at the same time. "Okay, front row blonde first, permission to speak granted."

The girl dropped her hand furiously and stood up. "X5-211, ma'am. Why do we have to submit to a physical and body cavity exam, ma'am?" she asked bluntly. Renfro sighed and smiled – she was actually _happy _that someone had asked the question.

"Well," she shrugged. "Someone's bleeding and we don't know who it is and we're just going to bypass asking if anyone wants to do this the easy way or the hard way and settle for the hard way."

"What if we don't want to do it the hard way?" 211 asked. "What if we want it easy?"

Another shrug from Renfro. "Then if anyone knows if a fellow squad mate has accidentally jarred an injury and bled all over their sheets – please tell and we'll have them taken care of." There was a silence all over the hall – the suffocating kind that meant that something heavy was about to happen.

Until one girl sprang up from her seat and pointed across the hall. "Ask 534! She's always getting her shakes at the wrong time and accidentally shoots someone. She might have shot someone and they didn't report into the surgical wing because she told them not to because she might be euthanized for being a liability!"

534, the redheaded X6 that followed 452 through Ward E, shouted, "639 should talk! She suffered a stomach injury in Guadalajara just last week!" Every head turned and looked at 639.

And then all hell broke loose.

"882's had to go to the infirmary _every day this week…" _

"521 was puking blood in the bathrooms earlier this morning – "

Suddenly nearly every X6 or X5 was on their feet, accusing a squad mate of having an injury that could have opened up. Nearly every person was shouting and most were standing on their seats to get a better leverage.

"QUIET DOWN!" Renfro shouted after a few minutes of random witch-hunting. "Back in your seats, there's an easier way to do this. Everyone who is in Ward E, stand up." Approximately fourteen girls and twelve boys stood up as everyone else sat back down.

"Everyone," Renfro raised her voice a notch. "_This _is Ward E. Acknowledge them, so as to recognize them in the hall. If one of them so much as sneezes wrong, I want it reported to me right away."

With that, they were quickly dismissed.

"I don't get it," 452 told one of her squad mates as they were on their way to Ward A. "Why doesn't she just cavity check the X6s instead of putting up this big charade?"

"Because, bitty '09er," X5-513 placed an arm around her shoulders – which 452 quickly pushed off. "She'd rather see all of us making each other uneasy than try and do anything about anything. Eventually someone will probably drop dead from blood loss or infection or something and she'll blame us and we'll feel guilty. It's the law of Manticore – Renfro hears about something, doesn't do a damn thing about it, then blames us when someone dies."

"Sounds about right," 452 nodded. "I'll see you tomorrow, huh?"

"Yeah, sure," 513 stepped into his cell, the door shutting and locking behind him. 452 lingered a moment by her own cell, before walking over to the wall opposite the doors and pressing the button for A-9. 513's cell door slid open again and he looked up from where he'd been lying on his bed.

"You know, I just remembered," 452 shrugged. "Breeding partners are supposed to actuallybe in the same room when the whole breeding program thingy is going on." 513 raised an eyebrow.

"I heard something about that. I thought it was a rumor." 452 rolled her eyes and walked into his cell, the door slamming shut behind her.

* * *

**A/N: Yes! I am alive! Good for telemarketers, bad for archenemies. **

**Next chapter should be coming some time soon. I hope. Please review! **


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